Title
Harvest Energy from the Water: A Self-Sustained Wireless Water Quality Sensing System.
Abstract
Water quality data is incredibly important and valuable, but its acquisition is not always trivial. A promising solution is to distribute a wireless sensor network in water to measure and collect the data; however, a drawback exists in that the batteries of the system must be replaced or recharged after being exhausted. To mitigate this issue, we designed a self-sustained water quality sensing system that is powered by renewable bioenergy generated from microbial fuel cells (MFCs). MFCs collect the energy released from native magnesium oxidizing microorganisms (MOMs) that are abundant in natural waters. The proposed energy-harvesting technology is environmentally friendly and can provide maintenance-free power to sensors for several years. Despite these benefits, an MFC can only provide microwatt-level power that is not sufficient to continuously power a sensor. To address this issue, we designed a power management module to accumulate energy when the input voltage is as low as 0.33V. We also proposed a radio-frequency (RF) activation technique to remotely activate sensors that otherwise are switched off in default. With this innovative technique, a sensor’s energy consumption in sleep mode can be completely avoided. Additionally, this design can enable on-demand data acquisitions from sensors. We implement the proposed system and evaluate its performance in a stream. In 3-month field experiments, we find the system is able to reliably collect water quality data and is robust to environment changes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3047646
ACM Trans. Embedded Comput. Syst.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Energy harvesting, microbial fuel cell, power management, radio-frequency (RF) activation, water quality monitoring
Power management,Wireless,Renewable energy,Computer science,Energy harvesting,Real-time computing,Sleep mode,Energy consumption,Wireless sensor network,Microbial fuel cell
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
17
1
1539-9087
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.36
30
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qi Chen1277.46
Ye Liu28421.81
Guangchi Liu361.46
Qing Yang428430.11
Xianming Shi520.36
Hongwei Gao63416.41
lu su7111866.61
Quanlong Li820.70